There’s a lot of open-source software I’m not proud of; probably, though, nothing
compares to docsql, as this rare piece of
Golang qualifies as one of the weirdest of my creations.

At Namshi, we’ve been using spreadsheets as a mean of configuration for quite some
time — you tell the stakeholder “hey, here’s a google doc, if you need to change
one of the translations just edit the doc and wait 5 mins” and the bets are down.

Sometimes we actually need to import this data into MySQL (could be a una-tantum
import as well as a scheduled job) and we traditionally did this manually,
by pulling down a .tsv export from Google docs, amending it and running something
such as LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE.

One evening, I found myself wifeless and with a strong desire to try out
cobra and viper,
so I started to look into automating the process of importing a spreadsheet hosted
on Google Docs into a MySQL table: the result was docsql, a small piece of
weird software that simply:

Considering this was a funny experiment to try to automate a task I do quite
infrequently1, I don’t think I’m going to spend a lot more time
expanding it or adding random features2, but I’m happy to share the
source code as I was pleasantly surprised with how straightforward it was to build
such a small, isolated CLI tool.